Many of us love to innovate, to push the boundaries, and to discover new solutions to make a tool excel beyond its initial potential. Yet, truth be told, most of us would benefit from focusing more on how best to tell our stories, or on making the story stronger – that tends to pay off more richly in the long run that spending time on accessorizing our uber camera.

To that point, I’m not sure that the Black Magic Cinema Camera will fit the bill “out of the box” for a lot of users out there looking for a production ready camera. The lack of certain key features and some of the choices Black Magic made – notably the size of the sensor (15.81mm x 8.8mm producing a 13 stop range 2.5K 12-bit RAW, 2432X1366 pixel CinemaDNG filesmake it difficult to put into immediate production use without a bit of accessory love.

That being said: this is exactly what I would say about most HDSLRs and even many digital cinema cameras…

You Talkin' to Me?

I really like this camera. It’s cheap, it shoots in 2.5K (which really is just over 1080), it has a good dynamic range, and it’s about the size of a DSLR. But, the crop factor is too large for me to want to run out and buy it. However, if someone gave it to me for a gift, I wouldn’t give it back. I’m very interested to see a short film that pushes the limits of this camera before I make a call about it.